Published July 23, 2026
I’m old enough now to be the sort of person who will occasionally observe, in all apparent earnestness, that being around young people makes me feel young at heart. This is a concession to the realities of middle age which I am loath to make, but here we are.
I have just returned from two weeks lecturing on Catholic social teaching in Poland with some three dozen young people, mostly in their early to mid-20s. By any measure, this group was exceptional relative to their peers: they were academically excellent, religiously serious (mostly devout Catholics), vocationally minded, and incredibly diverse (we had students from both Peoria and Papua New Guinea).
Yet for all this, they were consistent in their evaluation of their own generation: anxious, fearful, and generally unsettled. More than the normal uncertainties of youth, this generation seems unsure of who they are, who they are supposed to be, and whom they might look to for answers. In short, they have inherited a profound doubt about even the possibility of hope.
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Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).
